1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information updating apparatus for updating information about an apparatus for collecting job history and content history in a print driver and managing the job history and the content history for inspection, an image history inspection apparatus, an information updating method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image history inspection apparatus is known in which job and content histories in an image forming apparatus are collected, associated with each other, and managed in an integrated fashion, thereafter to inhibit unauthorized printing with reference to printing history. The apparatus is used to allow inspecting when, where, and how a process (copy, facsimile, print, and SEND) of which contents is performed by whom. At the time of inspection, the job and content histories are searched to search for the corresponding job history and content history from a large amount of history information.
The image history inspection apparatus has a full-text search function and an image search function. The full-text search is applied to text data extracted from image data acquired as content history and subjected to an optical character recognition (OCR) process. The image search is applied to image feature amount data extracted from image data as content history. Text data and image feature amount data are used as index information for search.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-229670 discusses an image forming apparatus in which copy history information is added to a copy source document or copied document every time processing is performed to inspect the copy history of the document. The added history information can be reproduced by scanning the document by a copying machine. Since history information is added to the copy source document or copied document and the history information is added or updated every time copying is performed, the copy history of a document can be tracked.
Addition and update of information are not performed on content history once registered. For this reason, if content history with a small information amount is registered, a search accuracy can be lowered, leading to a poor inspection efficiency.